Maggie's Take: Photographer Has 45 Pieces at Polk Museum of Art

Saturday

Jan 19, 2013 at 11:56 PM

The pictures look like something out of a dream — familiar, yet unusual. People doing odd things, such as dragging a cloud across the sky or a woman taking her head off her shoulders. The work of Maggie Taylor gets more surreal the farther you fall into the rabbit hole.

By MATT REINSTETLETHE LEDGER

The pictures look like something out of a dream — familiar, yet unusual.

People doing odd things, such as dragging a cloud across the sky or a woman taking her head off her shoulders. The work of Maggie Taylor gets more surreal the farther you fall into the rabbit hole.

"I like to leave it mysterious and open-ended so it's up to each individual viewer to come up with their own meaning to them," Taylor said in a phone interview.

"No Ordinary Days: Works by Maggie Taylor" just opened at the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland. The exhibition includes more than 45 pieces featuring 23 pieces on loan from the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Taylor, 51, takes a contemporary twist on traditional photography. With the picture-editing program Photoshop, Taylor is able to take classic photos and make them into original, vibrant print.

The raw elements are either digital photographs taken by Taylor of landscapes and places, or photos of people from the 19th century. All these old images are printed either on tin or daguerreotype, an 1800s photography method of printing images on copper plates.

Taylor has procured these prints from flea markets and antique shops.

She scans the daguerreotype into the computer and begins to add color and details. Taylor said it can take anywhere from three weeks to a month or more to work on a single image.

"I don't usually start with the idea of what it will be, I start with the little objects in the old photographs and make scans of them, then start to play with them in the computer," she said. "It's more of an intuitive process that as I'm working on things, they start to morph or change into something. I really don't know what the finished piece is going to be when I start out."

Adam Justice, curator of art at the Polk Museum of Art, said people will be drawn to the vibrant colors and fantastic subject matter.

"Each print is a story unto itself. There is no narrative, it's open for interpretation," Justice said.

The bright colors and hidden objects will give viewers a lot to analyze and interpret with each photo.

Included in the exhibit is a series of prints inspired by Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." These photos feature familiar elements: the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter at tea time and the deck of cards painting the roses. The photos from the "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" series come from the Harn Museum.

The exhibit's name, "No Ordinary Days," is also the name of an upcoming book featuring 120 of Taylor's images from 1998 to 2012.

But the name also has deeper meanings for Taylor. She said it's also a reflection of the people in the photos, living in the ever-changing times of the Victorian era, when photography was in its infancy.

"It's also a reflection of our own time. These are extraordinary times, and we're at the dawn of the digital revolution," Taylor said.

Taylor also mentioned there is no ordinary day working as an artist. Each is filled with new projects, new tasks different from the last.

Taylor received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Yale University in 1983, then went on to get a master of fine arts degree from the University of Florida in 1987, where she still lives and works. She started off as a still-life photographer doing work similar to what she does now — long before Photoshop. She would work with large-print cameras doing brightly colored collages until she started making the transition to using only computers in 1995.

"It gave a lot more flexibility to working on the images, instead of having to go back to the camera again and again to perfect a still-life image," Taylor said. "I'd have to go back and reshoot something multiple times. This way, with the computer, I could make decisions and changes in a more organic and intuitive working process."

Taylor would go on to have her work featured in the book "Adobe Photoshop Master Class: Maggie Taylor's Landscape of Dreams."

In the late 1990s, the art world hadn't fully embraced the digital age.

"The idea of putting an InkJet print on the wall seemed to be not of interest to most of the fine art galleries I was trying to work with so that's definitely changed," Taylor said. "Now it's hard to go to any big show and major museums around the country that doesn't have some digital work in it, so it's become much more accepted. And the materials have gotten better and more archival.

"I think people realize that just because it's a digital print doesn't mean there isn't craftsmanship involved."

[ Matt Reinstetle can be reached at matt.reinstetle@theledger.com or 863-802-7553. Follow Matt on Twitter @LedgerMatt. ]

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